by Yoshimichi Ota
One of the most popular young actresses in Japan was identified as having the same mitochondrial DNA pattern as that found in human skeletons from the Jomon era in Japan, about 2,500 years ago. This particular mitochondrial DNA pattern can also be found today in many other Japanese women, at a ratio of one out of 10 women. The ancestry of this mitochondrial DNA pattern goes even further back in time, and deep into China and Siberia.
Scientists believe that one has to go back 30,000 years to locate the oldest female ancestor bearing this particular pattern, somewhere around Lake Baikal in Russia.
So, one private TV station organized two trips for this actress to meet women in China and Russia who share with her exactly the same mitochondrial DNA pattern. She traveled deep into the countryside in the southwestern part of China, almost at the border with Tibet, and then made another trip to Buryatia.
The academies of science of both countries were helpful in locating some candidates for this project. So, this actress was able to meet one woman, a little bit older than herself, in China, and another woman, younger, in Buryatia. Of course, the three women in China, Russia, and Japan did not have a common language. However, they were able to communicate directly, in fact much more effectively than they could through interpreters, and they seemed so happy to have had this once-in-a-lifetime experience. The scientists involved in this project stated that this case of correlation between a plural number of persons and their common ancestor, 30,000 years removed, is a first.
According to another TV program, an NHK Special, people in the Stone Age inhabited the Japanese archipelago during the Jomon era, 13,000 to 3,000 years ago, and they developed a life-style in which they used the deep forests for harvesting food and lumber for building villages in their daily life, and even crafted thin-walled earthenware pots for cooking the acorns in order to remove the bitter tannin and for storing food. These earthenware pots are actually older than those found in Egypt or Mesopotamia.
According to recent research conducted on the mitochondrial DNA extracted from some human bones (some of the oldest) belonging to the Jomon era, whose ancestry used to be considered recently to derive from somewhere in Southern Asia, it is highly probable that these Jomon people originated from somewhere around Lake Baikal in Russia (current Buryatia). The mitochondrial DNA of three bodies were close to that of the Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese populations, respectively, while the mitochondrial DNA of 30 bodies was close to that of the Buryat population. An archaeological site indicating that Homo sapiens inhabited the current Buryatia region 23,000 years ago was discovered.
These findings suggest that the remote ancestry of today’s Japanese population goes back to the mammoth hunters in Siberia who lived during the Ice Age. When the global climate started to warm up, some of those hunters started moving south in pursuit of large animals, and further to Japan, while others crossed the Bering straight and reached the North American continent. Back then, Hokkaido, which is an island, was still part of the continent, and the Tsugaru straight between the current Hokkaido Island and the Honshu Island was deep but froze in winter, thus enabling people to travel further south.
Back then, there were various large animals in Japan, which became extinct due to the hunting and whose presence in ancient times we can glean only through their fossils. Among them, there were Naumann elephants. It appears that these animals were quickly hunted out by the ancestors of the Jomon people, who brought with them from Siberia the skills needed to hunt large animals and the craftsmanship to produce sophisticated lances equipped with replaceable blades made of a specific hard stone, obsidian. Today many sites from which obsidian was extracted to produce blades are located in Japan, ranging from the Hokkaido area to the Kinki region (to which Osaka belongs) of Honshu Island.
Thanks blam tDna. ;’)